The Bookseller - News - Horowitz says authors ‘running scared’ of halving sales by sharing opinions

In an interview with The Telegraph, Horowitz, author of the Alex Rider series as well as numerous other novels, said it is "wrong that writers should have to worry about what they are writing", and that they're now "following the agenda rather than setting it".

He told the newspaper: "It should be creative people who decide what is or is not acceptable. These days, the nervousness, the cancel culture, the fear of offending, of causing a Twitter storm, or the sudden laser-like focus that some writers attract - J K Rowling is the obvious example - strikes me as worrying and saddening."

In May, the author told the Hay Festival he'd been taken aback by his editor's notes on his then-upcoming book Where Seagulls Dare: A Diamond Brothers Case (Walker Books, 2nd June 2022), saying: "I have just suffered from my last book notes from my publisher which absolutely shocked me about things that I could or couldn't say, which is a children's book, not an adult book."